The Twitter Bot that (Dis)cribes Cities

Los Angeles. City of Angels. La La Land. Where dreams of fame materialize and evaporate like heat mirages on hot asphalt. This city has served as the muse of surrealist directors, retro-glam pop divas, and visionary rappers. To some, its sprawling sepia landscape evokes yearning and melancholia; for others it is marked by grit and resilience.

That’s how the Twitter bot aptly named City Describer *sees* this Reddit-sourced image of L.A. The bot is designed by Geoff Boeing, an urban data wonk at UC Berkeley (whose research and urban data tools we’ve written about in the past) using Microsoft’s open-source “custom vision” AI technology. And man, the bot delivers—although not always in the way you’d think.

I made this bot. It uses Microsoft's computer vision A.I. to describe photos of cities. Sometimes poetic... sometimes not even close. https://t.co/C33tC1nTiS

But by LOLing at these tweets, are we being facetious? Are these misreadings really misreadings? Or is even fledgling AI already making deductions about the human race so profound that our hubris prevents us from recognizing it? (#Neverforget when that Microsoft Twitter bot learned to be super racist, like, within a day.)

Really think about City Describer’s caption for L.A., for a second. The more enlightened among us will perhaps be able to see it for what it really is: an astute distillation for the city’s many complexities—a version of answer “42” to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

About the Author

Tanvi Misra is a staff writer for CityLab covering immigrant communities, housing, economic inequality, and culture. She also authors Navigator, a weekly newsletter for urban explorers (subscribe here). Her work also appears in The Atlantic, NPR, and BBC.